Watch this video. VLC will play it - I don't know about you Windows Media Player people out there - probably won't work.
As I am immersed in an engineering environment, pragmatism and nuts-and-bolts solutions solutions are everywhere. Practicality is fine and good - but lets be honest, there's something to be said for just plain coolness. I like OS X because its fucking cool looking and more fun to use. "More fun" and "fucking cool" aren't normally on engineering checklists, so I'd like to offer up a few examples of hot versus not.
The hula-project was recently released. Lets be honest, it's just a mail server right now with a rather cool web interface. It has scalability, an object oriented layout with functionality for spam filtering, address books, and calendaring. The project is only a few weeks old, and isn't particularly practical to use yet... but its got a damn cool logo and a good webpage. Hot. Conversely, opengroupware has been around for a couple years, is actually used by people in production environments, has more functionality in a fun bulleted list... but its got an ugly-ass web page and most of the developers are Germans. Not hot. Cool people like Nat Friedman are behind Hula and they have some innovative ideas. Hot. Germans and ugly webpage - not hot. I can tell you that I'm much more excited about Hula than OpenGroupware.
Not that web pages are everything. Names can be critically important. Compared to the open-source database PostgreSQL, MySQL is horrible. It doesn't have acid compliance, triggers, stored procedures... I'm pretty sure it still does table-level locking with the default myisam tables. Who cares. Can anyone even pronounce PostgreSQL? Thus MySQL reigns supreme simply because it has a cooler name.
Luminocity is the new ultra-groovy opengl accelerated window manager that the nerds at Red Hat are working on. That's the video you should have watched. Watch it again and again. Wobly windows are the antithesis of practicality and I love it. HOT. Windows 2000 on the other hand, not hot.
My point is that good looks can be quite discounted. Stacey is hot. Others can take their homely girls with child-bearing hips and practical shoes.
i'm going to tell nat friedman that you have a man-crush on him.
ReplyDeleteVLC - worked for me. Using that link. The link you gave me the first time when we talked about it, didnt. Don't know why it works now.
ReplyDelete